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Formal Mathematics for Mathematicians

Article  in  Journal of Automated Reasoning · February 2013

DOI: 10.1007/s10817-012-9268-z

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J Autom Reasoning (2013) 50:119–121
DOI 10.1007/s10817-012-9268-z

Formal Mathematics for Mathematicians

Foreward to the Special Issue

Andrzej Trybulec · Artur Kornilowicz · Adam Naumowicz ·

Krystyna Kuperberg

Received: 9 October 2012 / Accepted: 10 October 2012 / Published online: 1 November 2012
© The Author(s) 2012. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com

Abstract The collection of works for this special issue was inspired by the pre-
sentations given at the 2011 AMS Special Session on Formal Mathematics for
Mathematicians: Developing Large Repositories of Advanced Mathematics. The issue
features a collection of articles by practitioners of formalizing proofs who share a
deep interest in making computerized mathematics widely available.

Keywords Formalization · Repositories of mathematics ·

Mathematical proof reconstruction

1 Introduction

It has been shown in recent years that proof checkers and theorem provers can be
successfully used by mathematicians for automated proving and formal verification
of non-trivial results. One key to this success was the development of formalisms
close to the so-called “mathematical vernacular” in a way acceptable by mathe-
maticians and software capable of processing such input. Numerous attempts have
been made to make the mathematical community more interested in all these
developments, to name just the four excellent papers that appeared in Notices of

A. Trybulec · A. Kornilowicz · A. Naumowicz (B)

Department of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Bialystok, Bialystok, Poland
e-mail: adamn@math.uwb.edu.pl
A. Trybulec
e-mail: trybulec@math.uwb.edu.pl
A. Kornilowicz
e-mail: arturk@math.uwb.edu.pl

K. Kuperberg
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA
e-mail: kuperkm@auburn.edu
120 A. Trybulec et al.

the AMS in 2008 [4–6, 10], describing non-trivial examples developed by working
mathematicians, as well as how working mathematicians could get started using the
most popular systems available. There are also several conferences and workshops
organized by the community of formal proof developers with the aim to make the
idea of computerized formalization of mathematical proofs more widely recognized.
Most notably, let us mention here the yearly events that gather both practitioners and
theorists of formal proofs by presenting the on-going research and current trends in
this area under the umbrella of Conferences on Intelligent Computer Mathematics
[1, 3, 7] and Interactive Theorem Proving [2, 8, 9]. Still, most mathematicians are
probably not aware that the third revolution in mathematics (as Wiedijk called the
introduction of computer formalized mathematics [10]) has already begun and now
there is a chance to extend mathematics with new results and possibilities.
Hence, there came to existence the idea of organizing the AMS Special Session
on Formal Mathematics for Mathematicians: Developing Large Repositories of Ad-
vanced Mathematics at the AMS Joint Mathematics Meetings held in New Orleans,
USA in January 2011. The session gathered developers of several proof checking
systems and some others working on proof theory. The inspiring presentations and
discussions gave rise to this special issue of the Journal of Automated Reasoning.

2 Contents of the Issue

Amongst the crucial problems in collecting large formalized mathematics data are
efficient methods of accumulating knowledge, so that new developments can be
based on top of previously proved results. This issue is addressed in the paper by
J. Harrison, showing how a comprehensive HOL Light library was developed based
on the concept of n-dimensional Euclidean spaces. In a similar spirit, the article by Y.
Futa, H. Okazaki and Y. Shidama describes the development of elliptic curve systems
with applications in cryptoghraphic systems using Mizar.
For the formalized mathematics to successfuly advance the mathematical practice,
it is necessary to further develop formalisms with emphasis on computer verified
rigorous proofs that can be expressive enough to suit the needs of mathematicians
and enable practical computer encoding. Important contributions into this area are
the works by J. Belinfante describing the GOEDEL program and the paper on the
formalization of theories by J. Mycielski.
The development of existing libraries shows that creating large repositories of
advanced mathematics requires research on effective semantic-based knowledge
management to facilitate the process of maintaining the library and offering users
better interfaces and presentation formats. In their paper, J. Urban, P. Rudnicki and
G. Sutcliffe describe their work on improving the experience of authoring formal-
izations by employing artificial intelligence and automated theorem proving tools.
That work is also closely related to the aspects of presentation and interoperability
of formalized knowledge, which is a central of point of J. Urban’s joint paper with M.
Iancu, M. Kohlhase and F. Rabe.
The existing libraries of formalized mathematics are sufficiently large to allow
drawing conclusions about the structure of proofs, definitions and whole theories.
The papers by J. Alama and K. Pa̧k analyze and present methods to optimize
the existing body of interrelated mathematics accumulated in formal repositories.
Formal Mathematics for Mathematicians 121

Interacting with a huge library is, however, becoming a more and more difficult task
for the users of proof assistants. Some examples of efficient techniques to reduce the
effort of formalizing mathematics are the main topics of the article by M. Caminati
and G. Rosolini, as well as the paper by A. Korniłowicz.
The collection of articles reveals many similarities between the systems used for
the presented developments, but also significant differences. We believe that it is
an important challenge to identify the best of today’s achievements and to integrate
them into a single best practice environment. We feel confident that within this issue
the reader can find relevant papers that will further promote the potential of formal
mathematics to members of the mathematical community.
We would like to use this opportunity to express our gratitude to all research
groups and researchers who participated in the New Orleans meeting, and especially
those who submitted their contributions and made this special issue possible. We are
also very grateful to all the reviewers for their professional and responsible work.

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original
author(s) and the source are credited.

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